Nu folk gets the Mercury Music Prize vote

Some organic ingredients from the 1960s are being recycled with a new, trendy
face by British artists.

Laura Marling performs at Latitude festivalPhoto: P

By Helen Brown

6:08PM BST 21 Jul 2010

The critics read major cultural shifts into the shortlist of every major arts prize these days. Its the death of drawing! A renaissance for the disaster movie! The last hurrah of the jazz xylophone! So commentators picking over the shortlist for this year’s Mercury Music Prize have pounced on the inclusion of Laura Marling and Mumford & Sons to proclaim a sudden swell of support for the nu-folk scene.

The genre awkwardly known as “Nu Folk” was born, a year after New Labour, in 1997, when the Fence Record label was set up in Fife to release music by literate, lo-fi artists like King Creosote, James Yorkston and Pip Dylan. And its links to - and differences from - traditional folk echo those that emerged in the 1960s between the traditional folk singers (who wanted to keep the blood pumping through yea olde songs of peasant girls cast asunder by local lords) and a new breed of singer songwriters (like Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell) who wanted to take the earnest, acoustic, counter culture elements of that old music and weave them into something more modern, sophisticated and individual.

So artists in the modern, British wave of nu-folk are taking some of the organic ingredients from our musical heritage and mixing them into something fresh and new. They’ve dropped the tweeness and the hey-nonny-nonnies. But they’ve retained a strong sense of identification with the land, the British vernacular (albeit the 21st century version), a democratically DIY asthetic and inclusive warmth of a hearty campfire singalong.

Just like Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan back in the 1960s, artists like Laura Marling and Mumford & Sons appeal to educated, urban, middle class kids seeking an alternative lifestyle from the capitalist consumerism of their parents. They’re the kids who’re currently singing along to nu folk songs like Stornoway’s “Battery Human” which laments a culture in which people stay inside and stare at screens all day and begs for them to fix their loose connection with the “natural World Wide Web/ Where humans evolved in three-dimention/ So join the new revolution, revolution! To free the battery human!” It’s a pretty tune, sung with considered gusto to acoustic instruments. It’s a little bit clever, a little bit hip and very genuine. The sort of thing that’s never really gone completely out of style. It’s like the cider folk fans have always enjoyed so much. For a while it came served from mucky barrels by bearded old blokes in fields, and now it’s been repackaged in trendy glass bottles, poured over a bit of ice and served in cool, urban bars.